“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Monday, June 24, 2013

The Self-Righteousness Instinct: Steven Pinker on the Better Angels of Modernity and the Evils of Morality

Steven Pinker is one of the
few scientists who can write a really long book and still expect a significant
number of people to read it. But I have a feeling many who might be vaguely
intrigued by the buzz surrounding his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has
Declinedwonder why he had to make it nearly seven hundred outsized pages long. Many
curious folk likely also wonder why a linguist who proselytizes for
psychological theories derived from evolutionary or Darwinian accounts of human
nature would write a doorstop drawing on historical and cultural data to
describe the downward trajectories of rates of the worst societal woes. The
message that violence of pretty much every variety is at unprecedentedly low
rates comes as quite a shock, as it runs counter to our intuitive, news-fueled
sense of being on a crash course for Armageddon. So part of the reason behind
the book’s heft is that Pinker has to bolster his case with lots of evidence to
get us to rethink our views. But flipping through the book you find that
somewhere between half and a third of its mass is devoted, not to evidence of
the decline, but to answering the questions of why the trend has occurred and
why it gives every indication of continuing into the foreseeable future. So is
this a book about how evolution has made us violent or about how culture is
making us peaceful?

The first thing that needs to be
said about Better Angels is that you
should read it. Despite its girth, it’s at no point the least bit cumbersome to
read, and at many points it’s so fascinating that, weighty as it is, you’ll
have a hard time putting it down. Pinker has mastered a prose style that’s
simple and direct to the point of feeling casual without ever wanting for
sophistication. You can also rest assured that what you’re reading is timely
and important because it explores aspects of history and social evolution that
impact pretty much everyone in the world but that have gone ignored—if not
censoriously denied—by most of the eminences contributing to the zeitgeist
since the decades following the last world war.

Still, I suspect many people who
take the plunge into the first hundred or so pages are going to feel a bit
disoriented as they try to figure out what the real purpose of the book is, and
this may cause them to falter in their resolve to finish reading. The problem
is that the resistance Better Angels
runs to such a prodigious page-count simultaneously anticipating and responding
to doesn’t come from news media or the blinkered celebrities in the carnivals
of sanctimonious imbecility that are political talk shows. It comes from
Pinker’s fellow academics. The overall point of Better Angels remains obscure owing to some deliberate caginess on
the author’s part when it comes to identifying the true targets of his
arguments. This evasiveness doesn’t make the book difficult to read, but a quality of diffuseness to the theoretical sections, a multitude of strands left
dangling, does at points make you doubt whether Pinker had a clear purpose in
writing, which makes you doubt your own purpose in reading. With just a little
tying together of those strands, however, you start to see that while on the
surface he’s merely righting the misperception that over the course of history our
species has been either consistently or increasingly violent, what he’s really
after is something different, something bigger. He’s trying to instigate, or at
least play a part in instigating, a revolution—or more precisely a
renaissance—in the way scholars and intellectuals think not just about human
nature but about the most promising ways to improve the lot of human societies.

The longstanding complaint about
evolutionary explanations of human behavior is that by focusing on our biology
as opposed to our supposedly limitless capacity for learning they imply a certain
level of fixity to our nature, and this fixedness is thought to further imply a
limit to what political reforms can accomplish. The reasoning goes, if the
explanation for the way things are is to be found in our biology, then, unless
our biology changes, the way things are is the way they’re going to remain.
Since biological change occurs at the glacial pace of natural selection, we’re
pretty much stuck with the nature we have. Historically, many scholars have made
matters worse for evolutionary scientists today by applying ostensibly
Darwinian reasoning to what seemed at the time obvious biological differences
between human races in intelligence and capacity for acquiring the more
civilized graces, making no secret of their conviction that the differences
justified colonial expansion and other forms of oppressive rule. As a result, evolutionary
psychologists of the past couple of decades have routinely had to defend
themselves against charges that they’re secretly trying to advance some
reactionary (or even genocidal) agenda. Considering Pinker’s choice of topic in
Better Angels in light of this type
of criticism, we can start to get a sense of what he’s up to—and why his
efforts are discombobulating.

If you’ve spent any time on a
university campus in the past forty years, particularly if it was in a
department of the humanities, then you have been inculcated with an ideology
that was once labeled postmodernism but that eventually became so entrenched in
academia, and in intellectual culture more broadly, that it no longer requires
a label. (If you took a class with the word "studies" in the title, then you got a direct shot to the brain.) Many younger scholars actually deny any espousal of it—“I’m not a
pomo!”—with reference to a passé version marked by nonsensical tangles of
meaningless jargon and the conviction that knowledge of the real world is
impossible because “the real world” is merely a collective delusion or social
construction put in place to perpetuate societal power structures. The
disavowals notwithstanding, the essence of the ideology persists in an
inescapable but unremarked obsession with those same power structures—the
binaries of men and women, whites and blacks, rich and poor, the West and the
rest—and the abiding assumption that texts and other forms of media must be
assessed not just according to their truth content, aesthetic virtue, or
entertainment value, but also with regard to what we imagine to be their
political implications. Indeed, those imagined political implications are often
taken as clear indicators of the author’s true purpose in writing, which we
must sniff out—through a process called “deconstruction,” or its anemic
offspring “rhetorical analysis”—lest we complacently succumb to the subtle
persuasion.

In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, faith in what we now call modernism inspired intellectuals
to assume that the civilizations of Western Europe and the United States were
on a steady march of progress toward improved lives for all their own inhabitants
as well as the world beyond their borders. Democracy had brought about a new
age of government in which rulers respected the rights and freedom of citizens.
Medicine was helping ever more people live ever longer lives. And machines were
transforming everything from how people labored to how they communicated with
friends and loved ones. Everyone recognized that the driving force behind this
progress was the juggernaut of scientific discovery. But jump ahead a hundred
years to the early twenty-first century and you see a quite different attitude
toward modernity. As Pinker explains in the closing chapter of Better Angels,

A loathing of
modernity is one of the great constants of contemporary social criticism.
Whether the nostalgia is for small-town intimacy, ecological sustainability,
communitarian solidarity, family values, religious faith, primitive communism,
or harmony with the rhythms of nature, everyone longs to turn back the clock.
What has technology given us, they say, but alienation, despoliation, social
pathology, the loss of meaning, and a consumer culture that is destroying the
planet to give us McMansions, SUVs, and reality television? (692)

The
social pathology here consists of all the inequities and injustices suffered by
the people on the losing side of those binaries all us closet pomos go about obsessing
over. Then of course there’s industrial-scale war and all the other types of modern
violence. With terrorism, the War on Terror, the civil war in Syria, the
Israel-Palestine conflict, genocides in the Sudan, Kosovo, and Rwanda, and the
marauding bands of drugged-out gang rapists in the Congo, it seems safe to
assume that science and democracy and capitalism have contributed to the
construction of an unsafe global system with some fatal, even catastrophic
design flaws. And that’s before we consider the two world wars and the
Holocaust. So where the hell is this decline Pinker refers to in his title?

One way to think about the strain of
postmodernism or anti-modernism with the most currency today (and if you’re
reading this essay you can just assume your views have been influenced by it) is
that it places morality and politics—identity politics in particular—atop a
hierarchy of guiding standards above science and individual rights. So, for
instance, concerns over the possibility that a negative image of Amazonian
tribespeople
might encourage their further exploitation trump objective reporting on their
culture by anthropologists, even though there’s no evidence to support those
concerns. And evidence that the disproportionate number of men in STEM fields
reflects average differences between men and women in lifestyle
preferences and career interests is ignored out of deference to a
political ideal of perfect parity. The urge to grant moral and political ideals
veto power over science is justified in part by all the oppression and
injustice that abounds in modern civilizations—sexism, racism, economic
exploitation—but most of all it’s rationalized with reference to the violence
thought to follow in the wake of any movement toward modernity. Pinker writes,

“The twentieth
century was the bloodiest in history” is a cliché that has been used to indict
a vast range of demons, including atheism, Darwin, government, science,
capitalism, communism, the ideal of progress, and the male gender. But is it
true? The claim is rarely backed up by numbers from any century other than the
20th, or by any mention of the hemoclysms of centuries past. (193)

He
gives the question even more gravity when he reports that all those other areas
in which modernity is alleged to be such a colossal failure tend to improve in
the absence of violence. “Across time and space,” he writes in the preface, “the
more peaceable societies also tend to be richer, healthier, better educated,
better governed, more respectful of their women, and more likely to engage in
trade” (xxiii). So the question isn’t just about what the story with violence
is; it’s about whether science, liberal democracy, and capitalism are the
disastrous blunders we’ve learned to think of them as or whether they still just
might hold some promise for a better world.

*******

Thomas Hobbes

It’s in about the third chapter of Better Angels that you start to get the
sense that Pinker’s style of thinking is, well, way out of style. He seems to
be marching to the beat not of his own drummer but of some drummer from the
nineteenth century. In the chapter previous, he drew a line connecting the violence
of chimpanzees to that in what he calls non-state societies, and the images
he’s left you with are savage indeed. Now he’s bringing in the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s idea of a
government Leviathan that once
established immediately works to curb the violence that characterizes us humans
in states of nature and anarchy. According to sociologist Norbert Elias’s 1969 book, The
Civilizing Process, a work whose thesis plays a starring role
throughout Better Angels, the
consolidation of a Leviathan in England set in motion a trend toward
pacification, beginning with the aristocracy no less, before spreading down to
the lower ranks and radiating out to the countries of continental Europe and
onward thence to other parts of the world. You can measure your feelings of
unease in response to Pinker’s civilizing scenario as a proxy for how
thoroughly steeped you are in postmodernism.

Norbert Elias

The two factors missing from his
account of the civilizing pacification of Europe that distinguish it from the
self-congratulatory and self-exculpatory sagas of centuries past are the innate
superiority of the paler stock and the special mission of conquest and
conversion commissioned by a Christian god. In a later chapter, Pinker violates the
contemporary taboo against discussing—or even thinking about—the potential role
of average group (racial) differences in a propensity toward violence, but he
concludes the case for any such differences is unconvincing: “while recent
biological evolution may, in theory, have tweaked our inclinations toward
violence and nonviolence, we have no good evidence that it actually has” (621).
The conclusion that the Civilizing Process can’t be contingent on congenital
characteristics follows from the observation of how readily individuals from
far-flung regions acquire local habits of self-restraint and fellow-feeling
when they’re raised in modernized societies. As for religion, Pinker includes
it in a category of factors that are “Important but Inconsistent” with regard
to the trend toward peace, dismissing the idea that atheism leads to genocide
by pointing out that “Fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism in Spain,
Italy, Portugal, and Croatia, and though Hitler had little use for
Christianity, he was by no means an atheist, and professed that he was carrying
out a divine plan.” Though he cites several examples of atrocities incited by
religious fervor, he does credit “particular
religious movements at particular times in history” with successfully working
against violence (677).

Despite his penchant for blithely
trampling on the taboos of the liberal intelligentsia, Pinker refuses to
cooperate with our reflex to pigeonhole him with imperialists or far-right
traditionalists past or present. He continually holds up to ridicule the idea
that violence has any redeeming effects. In a section on the connection between increasing peacefulness and rising intelligence, he suggests that our violence-tolerant “recent ancestors” can rightly be considered “morally
retarded” (658). He singles out George W. Bush as an
unfortunate and contemptible counterexample in a trend toward more complex political
rhetoric among our leaders. And if it’s either gender that comes out not
looking as virtuous in Better Angels
it ain’t the distaff one. Pinker is difficult to categorize politically because
he’s a scientist through and through. What he’s after are reasoned arguments
supported by properly weighed evidence.

But there is something going on in Better Angels beyond a mere accounting
for the ongoing decline in violence that most of us are completely oblivious of
being the beneficiaries of. For one, there’s a challenge to the taboo status of
topics like genetic differences between groups, or differences between
individuals in IQ, or differences between genders. And there’s an implicit
challenge as well to the complementary premises he took on more directly in his
earlier book The Blank Slate that
biological theories of human nature always lead to oppressive politics and that
theories of the infinite malleability of human behavior always lead to progress
(communism relies on a blank slate theory, and it inspired guys like Stalin,
Mao, and Pol Pot to murder untold millions). But the most interesting and
important task Pinker has set for himself with Better Angels is a restoration of the Enlightenment, with its twin
pillars of science and individual rights, to its rightful place atop the
hierarchy of our most cherished guiding principles, the position we as a
society misguidedly allowed to be usurped by postmodernism, with its own dual
pillars of relativism and identity politics.

But, while the book succeeds handily in
undermining the moral case against modernism, it does so largely by stealth, with
only a few explicit references to the ideologies whose advocates have dogged
Pinker and his fellow evolutionary psychologists for decades. Instead, he
explores how our moral intuitions and political ideals often inspire us to make
profoundly irrational arguments for positions that rational scrutiny reveals to
be quite immoral, even murderous. As one illustration of how good causes can be
taken to silly, but as yet harmless, extremes, he gives the example of how
“violence against children has been defined down to dodgeball” (415) in gym
classes all over the US, writing that

The prohibition
against dodgeball represents the overshooting of yet another successful
campaign against violence, the century-long movement to prevent the abuse and
neglect of children. It reminds us of how a civilizing offensive can leave a
culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. The code
of etiquette bequeathed to us by this and other Rights Revolutions is pervasive
enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness. (381)

Such
“civilizing offensives” are deliberately undertaken counterparts to the
fortuitously occurring Civilizing Process Elias proposed to explain the jagged
downward slope in graphs of relative rates of violence beginning in the Middle
Ages in Europe. The original change Elias describes came about as a result of
rulers consolidating their territories and acquiring greater authority. As
Pinker explains,

Once Leviathan
was in charge, the rules of the game changed. A man’s ticket to fortune was no
longer being the baddest knight in the area but making a pilgrimage to the
king’s court and currying favor with him and his entourage. The court,
basically a government bureaucracy, had no use for hotheads and loose cannons,
but sought responsible custodians to run its provinces. The nobles had to
change their marketing. They had to cultivate their manners, so as not to
offend the king’s minions, and their empathy, to understand what they wanted.
The manners appropriate for the court came to be called “courtly” manners or
“courtesy.” (75)

And
this higher premium on manners and self-presentation among the nobles would lead
to a cascade of societal changes.

Elias first lighted on his theory
of the Civilizing Process as he was reading some of the etiquette guides which
survived from that era. It’s striking to us moderns to see that knights of yore
had to be told not to dispose of their snot by shooting it into their host’s
table cloth, but that simply shows how thoroughly people today internalize
these rules. As Elias explains, they’ve become second nature to us. Of course,
we still have to learn them as children. Pinker prefaces his discussion of
Elias’s theory with a recollection of his bafflement at why it was so important
for him as a child to abstain from using his knife as a backstop to help him
scoop food off his plate with a fork. Table manners, he concludes, reside on
the far end of a continuum of self-restraint at the opposite end of which are once-common
practices like cutting off the nose of a dining partner who insults you.
Likewise, protecting children from the perils of flying rubber balls is the
product of a campaign against the once-common custom of brutalizing them. The
centrality of self-control is the common underlying theme: we control our urge
to misuse utensils, including their use in attacking our fellow diners, and we
control our urge to throw things at our classmates, even if it’s just in sport.
The effect of the Civilizing Process in the Middle Ages, Pinker explains, was
that “A culture of honor—the readiness to take revenge—gave way to a culture of
dignity—the readiness to control one’s emotions” (72). In other words,
diplomacy became more important than deterrence.

What we’re learning here is that even
an evolved mind can adjust to changing incentive schemes. Chimpanzees have to
control their impulses toward aggression, sexual indulgence, and food
consumption in order to survive in hierarchical bands with other chimps, many
of whom are bigger, stronger, and better-connected. Much of the violence in
chimp populations takes the form of adult males vying for positions in the
hierarchy so they can enjoy the perquisites males of lower status must forgo to
avoid being brutalized. Lower ranking males meanwhile bide their time, hopefully
forestalling their gratification until such time as they grow stronger or the
alpha grows weaker. In humans, the capacity for impulse-control and the habit
of delaying gratification are even more important because we live in even more
complex societies. Those capacities can either lie dormant or they can be
developed to their full potential depending on exactly how complex the society
is in which we come of age. Elias noticed a connection between the move toward
more structured bureaucracies, less violence, and an increasing focus on
etiquette, and he concluded that self-restraint in the form of adhering to
strict codes of comportment was both an advertisement of, and a type of
training for, the impulse-control that would make someone a successful bureaucrat.

Aside from children who can’t fathom
why we’d futz with our forks trying to capture recalcitrant peas, we normally
take our society’s rules of etiquette for granted, no matter how inconvenient
or illogical they are, seldom thinking twice before drawing unflattering
conclusions about people who don’t bother adhering to them, the ones for whom
they aren’t second nature. And the importance we place on etiquette goes beyond
table manners. We judge people according to the discretion with which they
dispose of any and all varieties of bodily effluent, as well as the delicacy
with which they discuss topics sexual or otherwise basely instinctual. Elias
and Pinker’s theory is that, while the particular rules are largely arbitrary,
the underlying principle of transcending our animal nature through the
application of will, motivated by an appreciation of social convention and the
sensibilities of fellow community members, is what marked the transition of
certain constituencies of our species from a violent non-state existence to a
relatively peaceful, civilized lifestyle. To Pinker, the uptick in violence
that ensued once the counterculture of the 1960s came into full blossom was no
coincidence. The squares may not have been as exciting as the rock stars who
sang their anthems to hedonism and the liberating thrill of sticking it to the
man. But a society of squares has certain advantages—a lower probability for
each of its citizens of getting beaten or killed foremost among them.

The Civilizing Process as Elias and
Pinker, along with Immanuel Kant, understand it picks up momentum as levels of
peace conducive to increasingly complex forms of trade are achieved. To
understand why the move toward markets or “gentle commerce” would lead to
decreasing violence, us pomos have to swallow—at least momentarily—our animus
for Wall Street and all the corporate fat cats in the top one percent of the
wealth distribution. The basic dynamic underlying trade is that one person has
access to more of something than they need, but less of something else, while another
person has the opposite balance, so a trade benefits them both. It’s a win-win,
or a positive-sum game. The hard part for educated liberals is to appreciate
that economies work to increase the total wealth; there isn’t a set quantity
everyone has to divvy up in a zero-sum game, an exchange in which every gain
for one is a loss for another. And Pinker points to another benefit:

Positive-sum
games also change the incentives for violence. If you’re trading favors or
surpluses with someone, your trading partner suddenly becomes more valuable to
you alive than dead. You have an incentive, moreover, to anticipate what he
wants, the better to supply it to him in exchange for what you want. Though
many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome,
hold businesspeople in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free
market puts a premium on empathy. (77)

The
Occupy Wall Street crowd will want to jump in here with a lengthy list of
examples of businesspeople being unempathetic in the extreme. But Pinker isn’t
saying commerce always forces people to be altruistic; it merely encourages
them to exercise their capacity for perspective-taking. Discussing the
emergence of markets, he writes,

The advances
encouraged the division of labor, increased surpluses, and lubricated the
machinery of exchange. Life presented people with more positive-sum games and
reduced the attractiveness of zero-sum plunder. To take advantage of the
opportunities, people had to plan for the future, control their impulses, take
other people’s perspectives, and exercise the other social and cognitive skills
needed to prosper in social networks. (77)

And
these changes, the theory suggests, will tend to make merchants less likely on
average to harm anyone. As bad as bankers can be, they’re not out sacking
villages.

Once you have commerce, you also
have a need to start keeping records. And once you start dealing with distant
partners it helps to have a mode of communication that travels. As writing
moved out of the monasteries, and as technological advances in transportation
brought more of the world within reach, ideas and innovations collided to
inspire sequential breakthroughs and discoveries. Every advance could be
preserved, dispersed, and ratcheted up. Pinker focuses on two relatively brief historical
periods that witnessed revolutions in the way we think about violence, and both
came in the wake of major advances in the technologies involved in
transportation and communication. The first is the Humanitarian Revolution that
occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the second covers
the Rights Revolutions in the second half of the twentieth. The Civilizing
Process and gentle commerce weren’t sufficient to end age-old institutions like
slavery and the torture of heretics. But then came the rise of the novel as a
form of mass entertainment, and with all the training in perspective-taking readers were undergoing the hitherto unimagined suffering of slaves, criminals,
and swarthy foreigners became intolerably imaginable. People began to agitate
and change ensued.

The Humanitarian Revolution occurred
at the tail end of the Age of Reason and is recognized today as part of the
period known as the Enlightenment. According to some scholarly scenarios, the
Enlightenment, for all its successes like the American Constitution and the
abolition of slavery, paved the way for all those allegedly unprecedented
horrors in the first half of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding all this
ivory tower traducing, the Enlightenment emerged from dormancy after the Second
World War and gradually gained momentum, delivering us into a period Pinker
calls the New Peace. Just as the original Enlightenment was preceded by
increasing cosmopolitanism, improving transportation, and an explosion of
literacy, the transformations that brought about the New Peace followed a burst
of technological innovation. For Pinker, this is no coincidence. He writes,

If I were to put
my money on the single most important exogenous cause of the Rights
Revolutions, it would be the technologies that made ideas and people
increasingly mobile. The decades of the Rights Revolutions were the decades of
the electronics revolutions: television, transistor radios, cable, satellite,
long-distance telephones, photocopiers, fax machines, the Internet, cell
phones, text messaging, Web video. They were the decades of the interstate
highway, high-speed rail, and the jet airplane. They were the decades of the
unprecedented growth in higher education and in the endless frontier of
scientific research. Less well known is that they were also the decades of an
explosion in book publishing. From 1960 to 2000, the annual number of books
published in the United States increased almost fivefold. (477)

Violence
got slightly worse in the 60s. But the Civil Rights Movement was underway, Women’s
Rights were being extended into new territories, and people even began to acknowledge
that animals could suffer, prompting them to argue that we shouldn’t cause them
to do so without cause. Today the push for Gay Rights continues. By 1990, the
uptick in violence was over, and so far the move toward peace is looking like
an ever greater success. Ironically, though, all the new types of media
bringing images from all over the globe into our living rooms and pockets
contributes to the sense that violence is worse than ever.

*******

Three factors brought about a
reduction in violence over the course of history then: strong government,
trade, and communications technology. These factors had the impact they did
because they interacted with two of our innate propensities, impulse-control
and perspective-taking, by giving individuals both the motivation and the
wherewithal to develop them both to ever greater degrees. It’s difficult to
draw a clear delineation between developments that were driven by chance or
coincidence and those driven by deliberate efforts to transform societies. But
Pinker does credit political movements based on moral principles with having
played key roles:

Insofar as
violence is immoral, the Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life often
requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard
practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason
and stated in the language of rights. We force ourselves into the shoes (or
paws) of other sentient beings and consider their interests, starting with
their interest in not being hurt or killed, and we ignore superficialities that
may catch our eye such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and
to some extent, species. (475)

Some
of the instincts we must reject in order to bring about peace, however, are
actually moral instincts.

Pinker is setting up a
distinction here between different kinds of morality. The one he describes
that’s based on perspective-taking—which evidence he presents later suggests
inspires sympathy—and is “stated in the language of rights” is the one he
credits with transforming the world for the better. Of the idea that
superficial differences shouldn’t distract us from our common humanity, he
writes,

This conclusion,
of course, is the moral vision of the Enlightenment and the strands of humanism
and liberalism that have grown out of it. The Rights Revolutions are liberal
revolutions. Each has been associated with liberal movements, and each is
currently distributed along a gradient that runs, more or less, from Western
Europe to the blue American states to the red American states to the
democracies of Latin America and Asia and then to the more authoritarian
countries, with Africa and most of the Islamic world pulling up the rear. In
every case, the movements have left Western cultures with excesses of propriety
and taboo that are deservedly ridiculed as political correctness. But the
numbers show that the movements have reduced many causes of death and suffering
and have made the culture increasingly intolerant of violence in any form.
(475-6)

So
you’re not allowed to play dodgeball at school or tell off-color jokes at work,
but that’s a small price to pay. The most remarkable part of this passage
though is that gradient he describes; it suggests the most violent regions of
the globe are also the ones where people are the most obsessed with morality,
with things like Sharia and so-called family values. It also suggests that academic
complaints about the evils of Western culture are unfounded and startlingly misguided.
As Pinker casually points out in his section on Women’s Rights, “Though the
United States and other Western nations are often accused of being misogynistic
patriarchies, the rest of the world is immensely worse” (413).

Jonathan Haidt

The
Better Angels of Our Nature came out about a year before Jonathan Haidt’s
The Righteous Mind, but Pinker’s
book beats Haidt’s to the punch by identifying a serious flaw in his reasoning.
The Righteous Mind explores how
liberals and conservatives conceive of morality differently, and Haidt argues
that each conception is equally valid so we should simply work to understand
and appreciate opposing political views. It’s not like you’re going to change
anyone’s mind anyway, right? But the liberal ideal of resisting certain moral
intuitions tends to bring about a rather important change wherever it’s allowed
to be realized. Pinker writes that

right or wrong,
retracting the moral sense from its traditional spheres of community,
authority, and purity entails a reduction of violence. And that retraction is
precisely the agenda of classical liberalism: a freedom of individuals from
tribal and authoritarian force, and a tolerance of personal choices as long as
they do not infringe on the autonomy and well-being of others. (637)

Classical
liberalism—which Pinker distinguishes from contemporary political
liberalism—can even be viewed as an effort to move morality away from the realm
of instincts and intuitions into the more abstract domains of law and reason.
The perspective-taking at the heart of Enlightenment morality can be said to
consist of abstracting yourself from your identifying characteristics and
immediate circumstances to imagine being someone else in unfamiliar straits. A
man with a job imagines being a woman who can’t get one. A white man on good
terms with law enforcement imagines being a black man who gets harassed. This
practice of abstracting experiences and distilling individual concerns down to
universal principles is the common thread connecting Enlightenment morality to
science.

So it’s probably no coincidence,
Pinker argues, that as we’ve gotten more peaceful, people in Europe and the US
have been getting better at abstract reasoning as well, a trend which has been
going on for as long as researchers have had tests to measure it. Psychologists
over the course of the twentieth century have had to adjust IQ test results
(the average is always 100) a few points every generation because scores on a
few subsets of questions have kept going up. The regular rising of scores is
known as the Flynn Effect, after
psychologist James Flynn, who was one of the first researchers to realize the
trend was more than methodological noise. Having posited a possible connection
between scientific and moral reasoning, Pinker asks, “Could there be a moral Flynn Effect?” He explains,

We have several
grounds for supposing that enhanced powers of reason—specifically, the ability
to set aside immediate experience, detach oneself from a parochial vantage
point, and frame one’s ideas in abstract, universal terms—would lead to better
moral commitments, including an avoidance of violence. And we have just seen
that over the course of the 20th century, people’s reasoning
abilities—particularly their ability to set aside immediate experience, detach
themselves from a parochial vantage point, and think in abstract terms—were
steadily enhanced. (656)

Pinker
cites evidence from an array of studies showing that high-IQ people tend have
high moral IQs as well. One of them, an infamous
study
by psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa based on data from over twenty thousand young
adults in the US, demonstrates that exceptionally intelligent people tend to
hold a particular set of political views. And just as Pinker finds it necessary
to distinguish between two different types of morality he suggests we also need
to distinguish between two different types of liberalism:

Intelligence is
expected to correlate with classical liberalism because classical liberalism is
itself a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives that is inherent
to reason itself. Intelligence need not correlate with other ideologies that
get lumped into contemporary left-of-center political coalitions, such as
populism, socialism, political correctness, identity politics, and the Green
movement. Indeed, classical liberalism is sometimes congenial to the
libertarian and anti-political-correctness factions in today’s right-of-center
coalitions. (662)

And
Kanazawa’s findings bear this out. It’s not liberalism in general that
increases steadily with intelligence, but a particular kind of liberalism, the
type focusing more on fairness than on ideology.

*******

Following the chapters devoted to
historical change, from the early Middle Ages to the ongoing Rights
Revolutions, Pinker includes two chapters on psychology, the first on our “Inner
Demons” and the second on our “Better Angels.” Ideology gets some prime real
estate in the Demons chapter, because, he writes, “the really big body counts
in history pile up” when people believe they’re serving some greater good. “Yet
for all that idealism,” he explains, “it’s ideology that drove many of the
worst things that people have ever done to each other.” Christianity, Nazism,
communism—they all “render opponents of the ideology infinitely evil and hence
deserving of infinite punishment” (556). Pinker’s discussion of morality, on
the other hand, is more complicated. It begins, oddly enough, in the Demons
chapter, but stretches into the Angels one as well. This is how the section on
morality in the Angels chapter begins:

The world has
far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit
of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the
people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological
genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and
conquest. The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those
who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that
bring them no tangible benefit. The torture of heretics and conversos, the
burning of witches, the imprisonment of homosexuals, and the honor killing of
unchaste sisters and daughters are just a few examples. (622)

The
postmodern push to give precedence to moral and political considerations over
science, reason, and fairness may seem like a good idea at first. But political
ideologies can’t be defended on the grounds of their good intentions—they all
have those. And morality has historically caused more harm than good. It’s only
the minimalist, liberal morality that has any redemptive promise:

Though the net
contribution of the human moral sense to human well-being may well be negative,
on those occasions when it is suitably deployed it can claim some monumental
advances, including the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment and the
Rights Revolutions of recent decades. (622)

One of the problems with ideologies
Pinker explores is that they lend themselves too readily to for-us-or-against-us
divisions which piggyback on all our tribal instincts, leading to
dehumanization of opponents as a step along the path to unrestrained violence. But,
we may ask, isn’t the Enlightenment just another ideology? If not, is there
some reliable way to distinguish an ideological movement from a “civilizing
offensive” or a “Rights Revolution”? Pinker doesn’t answer these questions
directly, but it’s in his discussion of the demonic side of morality where Better Angels offers its most profound
insights—and it’s also where we start to be able to piece together the larger
purpose of the book. He writes,

In The Blank Slate I argued that the modern
denial of the dark side of human nature—the doctrine of the Noble Savage—was a
reaction against the romantic militarism, hydraulic theories of aggression, and
glorification of struggle and strife that had been popular in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. Scientists and scholars who question the
modern doctrine have been accused of justifying
violence and have been subjected to vilification, blood libel, and physical
assault. The Noble Savage myth appears to be another instance of an
antiviolence movement leaving a cultural legacy of propriety and taboo. (488)

Since
Pinker figured that what he and his fellow evolutionary psychologists kept
running up against was akin to the repulsion people feel against poor table
manners or kids winging balls at each other in gym class, he reasoned that he
ought to be able to simply explain to the critics that evolutionary
psychologists have no intention of justifying, or even encouraging complacency
toward, the dark side of human nature. “But I am now convinced,” he writes
after more than a decade of trying to explain himself, “that a denial of the
human capacity for evil runs even deeper, and may itself be a feature of human
nature” (488). That feature, he goes on to explain, makes us feel compelled to
label as evil anyone who tries to explain evil scientifically—because evil as a
cosmic force beyond the reach of human understanding plays an indispensable role
in group identity.

Roy Baumeister

Pinker began to fully appreciate the
nature of the resistance to letting biology into discussions of human
harm-doing when he read about the work of psychologist Roy Baumeister exploring the wide
discrepancies
in accounts of anger-inducing incidents between perpetrators and victims. The
first studies looked at responses to minor offenses, but Baumeister went on to
present evidence that the pattern, which Pinker labels the “Moralization Gap,”
can be scaled up to describe societal attitudes toward historical atrocities. Pinker
explains,

The Moralization
Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for
recompense between a victim and a perpetrator. Like opposing counsel in a
lawsuit over a tort, the social plaintiff will emphasize the deliberateness, or
at least the depraved indifference, of the defendant’s action, together with
the pain and suffering the plaintiff endures. The social defendant will
emphasize the reasonableness or unavoidability of the action, and will minimize
the plaintiff’s pain and suffering. The competing framings shape the negotiations
over amends, and also play to the gallery in a competition for their sympathy
and for a reputation as a responsible reciprocator. (491)

Another
of the Inner Demons Pinker suggests plays a key role in human violence is the
drive for dominance, which he explains operates not just at the level of the
individual but at that of the group to which he or she belongs. We want our
group, however we understand it in the immediate context, to rest comfortably
atop a hierarchy of other groups. What happens is that the Moralization Gap
gets mingled with this drive to establish individual and group superiority. You
see this dynamic playing out even in national conflicts. Pinker points out,

The victims of a
conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators
are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present. Ordinarily we tend to think of
historical memory as a good thing, but when the events being remembered are
lingering wounds that call for redress, it can be a call to violence. (493)

Name
a conflict and with little effort you’ll likely also be able to recall
contentions over historical records associated with it.

The outcome of the Moralization Gap
being taken to the group historical level is what Pinker and Baumeister call the
“Myth of Pure Evil.” Harm-doing narratives start to take on religious overtones
as what began as a conflict between regular humans pursuing or defending their
interests, in ways they probably reasoned were just, transforms into an eternal
struggle against inhuman and sadistic agents of chaos. And Pinker has come to
realize that it is this Myth of Pure Evil that behavioral scientists ineluctably
end up blaspheming:

Baumeister notes
that in the attempt to understand harm-doing, the viewpoint of the scientist or
scholar overlaps with the viewpoint of the perpetrator. Both take a detached,
amoral stance toward the harmful act. Both are contextualizers, always
attentive to the complexities of the situation and how they contributed to the
causation of the harm. And both believe that the harm is ultimately explicable.
(495)

This
is why evolutionary psychologists who study violence inspire what Pinker in The Blank Slate called “political
paranoia and moral exhibitionism” (106) on the part of us naïve pomos, ravenously
eager to showcase our valor by charging once more into the breach against the
mythical malevolence. All the while, our impregnable assurance of our own righteousness
is borne of the conviction that we’re standing up for the oppressed. Pinker
writes,

The viewpoint of
the moralist, in contrast, is the viewpoint of the victim. The harm is treated
with reverence and awe. It continues to evoke sadness and anger long after it
was perpetrated. And for all the feeble ratiocination we mortals throw at it,
it remains a cosmic mystery, a manifestation of the irreducible and
inexplicable existence of evil in the universe. Many chroniclers of the
Holocaust consider it immoral even to try to explain it. (495-6)

We
simply can’t help inflating the magnitude of the crime in our attempt to
convince our ideological opponents of their folly—though what we’re really
inflating is our own, and our group’s, glorification—and so we can’t abide
anyone puncturing our overblown conception because doing so lends credence to
the opposition, making us look a bit foolish in the process for all our
exaggerations.

Reading Better Angels, you get the sense that Pinker experienced some
genuine surprise and some real delight in discovering more and more
corroboration for the idea that rates of violence have been trending downward in
nearly every domain he explored. But things get tricky as you proceed through
the pages because many of his arguments take on opposing positions he avoids
naming. He seems to have seen the trove of evidence for declining violence as
an opportunity to outflank the critics of evolutionary psychology in leftist,
postmodern academia (to use a martial metaphor). Instead of calling them
out directly, he circles around to chip away at the moral case for their
political mission. We see this, for example, in his discussion of rape, which
psychologists get into all kinds of trouble for trying to explain. After examining
how scientists seem to be taking the perspective of perpetrators, Pinker goes
on to write,

The accusation
of relativizing evil is particularly likely when the motive the analyst imputes
to the perpetrator appears to be venial, like jealousy, status, or retaliation,
rather than grandiose, like the persistence of suffering in the world or the
perpetuation of race, class, or gender oppression. It is also likely when the
analyst ascribes the motive to every human being rather than to a few
psychopaths or to the agents of a malignant political system (hence the
popularity of the doctrine of the Noble Savage). (496)

In
his earlier section on Woman’s Rights and the decline of rape, he attributed
the difficulty in finding good data on the incidence of the crime, as well as
some of the “preposterous” ideas about what motivates it, to the same kind of
overextensions of anti-violence campaigns that lead to arbitrary rules about the
use of silverware and proscriptions against dodgeball:

Common sense
never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline in
violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that “rape or sexual
assault is not an act of sex or lust—it’s about aggression, power, and
humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist’s goal is domination.” (To
which the journalist
Heather MacDonald
replies: “The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing
only, and it’s not a reinstatement of the patriarchy.”) (406)

Jumping
ahead to Pinker’s discussion of the Moralization Gap, we see that the theory
that rape is about power, as opposed to the much more obvious theory that it’s
about sex, is an outgrowth of the Myth of Pure Evil, an inflation of the
mundane drives that lead some pathetic individuals to commit horrible crimes
into eternal cosmic forces, inscrutable and infinitely punishable.

When feminists impute political
motives to rapists, they’re crossing the boundary from Enlightenment morality
to the type of moral ideology that inspires dehumanization and violence. The
good news is that it’s not difficult to distinguish between the two. From the
Enlightenment perspective, rape is indefensibly wrong because it violates the
autonomy of the victim—it’s an act of violence perpetrated by one individual
against another. From the ideological perspective, every rape must be
understood in the context of the historical oppression of women by men; it transcends
the individuals involved as a representation of a greater evil. The
rape-as-a-political-act theory also comes dangerously close to implying a type
of collective guilt, which is a clear violation of individual rights.

Scholars already make the
distinction between three different waves of feminism. The first two fall
within Pinker’s definition of Rights Revolutions; they encompassed pushes for
suffrage, marriage rights, and property rights, and then the rights to equal
pay and equal opportunity in the workplace. The third wave is
avowedly postmodern,
its advocates committed to the ideas that gender is a pure social construct and
that suggesting otherwise is an act of oppression. What you come away from Better Angels realizing, even though
Pinker doesn’t say it explicitly, is that somewhere between the second and third
waves feminists effectively turned against the very ideas and institutions that
had been most instrumental in bringing about the historical improvements in
women’s lives from the Middle Ages to the turn of the twenty-first century. And so
it is with all the other ideologies on the postmodern roster.

Another misguided propaganda
tactic that dogged Pinker’s efforts to identify historical trends in violence
can likewise be understood as an instance of inflating the severity of crimes
on behalf of a moral ideology—and the taboo placed on puncturing the bubble or
vitiating the purity of evil with evidence and theories of venial motives. As he
explains in the preface, “No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by
announcing that things are getting better, and bearers of good news are often
advised to keep their mouths shut lest they lull people into complacency”
(xxii). Here again the objective researcher can’t escape the appearance of
trying to minimize the evil, and therefore risks being accused of looking the
other way, or even of complicity. But in an earlier section on genocide Pinker provides
the quintessential Enlightenment rationale for the clear-eyed scientific
approach to studying even the worst atrocities. He writes,

The effort to
whittle down the numbers that quantify the misery can seem heartless,
especially when the numbers serve as propaganda for raising money and
attention. But there is a moral imperative in getting the facts right, and not
just to maintain credibility. The discovery that fewer people are dying in wars
all over the world can thwart cynicism among compassion-fatigued news readers
who might otherwise think that poor countries are irredeemable hellholes. And a
better understanding of what drove the numbers down can steer us toward doing
things that make people better off rather than congratulating ourselves on how altruistic
we are. (320)

This
passage can be taken as the underlying argument of the whole book. And it
gestures toward some far-reaching ramifications to the idea that exaggerated
numbers are a product of the same impulse that causes us to inflate crimes to the status of
pure evil.

Could it be that the nearly
universal misperception that violence is getting worse all over the world, that
we’re doomed to global annihilation, and that everywhere you look is evidence
of the breakdown in human decency—could it be that the false impression Pinker
set out to correct with Better Angels
is itself a manifestation of a natural urge in all of us to seek out evil and
aggrandize ourselves by unconsciously overestimating it? Pinker himself never
goes as far as suggesting the mass ignorance of waning violence is a byproduct
of an instinct toward self-righteousness. Instead, he writes of the “gloom”
about the fate of humanity,

I think it comes
from the innumeracy of our journalistic and intellectual culture. The journalist
Michael Kinsley recently wrote, “It is a crushing disappointment that Boomers
entered adulthood with Americans killing and dying halfway around the world,
and now, as Boomers reach retirement and beyond, our country is doing the same
damned thing.” This assumes that 5,000 Americans dying is the same damned thing
as 58,000 Americans dying, and that a hundred thousand Iraqis being killed is
the same damned thing as several million Vietnamese being killed. If we don’t
keep an eye on the numbers, the programming policy “If it bleeds it leads” will
feed the cognitive shortcut “The more memorable, the more frequent,” and we
will end up with what has been called a false sense of insecurity. (296)

Pinker
probably has a point, but the self-righteous undertone of Kinsley’s “same
damned thing” is unmistakable. He’s effectively saying, I’m such an outstanding
moral being the outrageous evilness of the invasion of Iraq is blatantly
obvious to me—why isn’t it to everyone else? And that same message seems to
underlie most of the statements people make expressing similar sentiments about
how the world is going to hell.

Though Pinker neglects to tie all
the strands together, he still manages to suggest that the drive to dominance,
ideology, tribal morality, and the Myth of Pure Evil are all facets of the same
disastrous flaw in human nature—an instinct for self-righteousness. Progress on
the moral front—real progress like fewer deaths, less suffering, and more
freedom—comes from something much closer to utilitarian pragmatism than
activist idealism. Yet the activist tradition is so thoroughly enmeshed in our
university culture that we’re taught to exercise our powers of political
righteousness even while engaging in tasks as mundane as reading books and
articles. If the decline in violence and the improvement of the general weal in
various other areas are attributable to the Enlightenment, then many of the
assumptions underlying postmodernism are turned on their heads. If social ills
like warfare, racism, sexism, and child abuse exist in cultures untouched by
modernism—and they in fact not only exist but tend to be much worse—then
science can’t be responsible for creating them; indeed, if they’ve all trended
downward with the historical development of all the factors associated with
male-dominated western culture, including strong government, market economies,
run-away technology, and scientific progress, then postmodernism not only has
everything wrong but threatens the progress achieved by the very institutions
it depends on, emerged from, and squanders innumerable scholarly careers
maligning.

Of course some Enlightenment
figures and some scientists do evil things. Of course living even in the most
Enlightened of civilizations is no guarantee of safety. But postmodernism is an
ideology based on the premise that we ought to discard a solution to our societal
woes for not working perfectly and immediately, substituting instead remedies
that have historically caused more problems than they solved by orders of
magnitude. The argument that there’s a core to the Enlightenment that some of
its representatives have been faithless to when they committed atrocities may seem
reminiscent of apologies for Christianity based on the fact that Crusaders and
Inquisitors weren’t loving their neighbors as Christ enjoined. The difference
is that the Enlightenment works—in just a few centuries it’s transformed the
world and brought about a reduction in violence no religion has been able to match
in millennia. If anything, the big monotheistic religions brought about more
violence.

Embracing Enlightenment morality
or classical liberalism doesn’t mean we should give up our efforts to make the
world a better place. As Pinker describes the transformation he hopes to
encourage with Better Angels,

As one becomes
aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past
seems less innocent; the present less sinister. One starts to appreciate the
small gifts of coexistence that would have seemed utopian to our ancestors: the
interracial family playing in the park, the comedian who lands a zinger on the
commander in chief, the countries that quietly back away from a crisis instead
of escalating to war. The shift is not toward complacency: we enjoy the peace
we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence
in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the
violence that remains in our time. Indeed, it is a recognition of the decline
of violence that best affirms that such efforts are worthwhile. (xxvi)

Since our task for
the remainder of this century is to extend the reach of science, literacy, and
the recognition of universal human rights farther and farther along the Enlightenment
gradient until they're able to grant the same increasing likelihood of a long peaceful
life to every citizen of every nation of the globe, and since the key to
accomplishing this task lies in fomenting future Rights Revolutions while at
the same time recognizing, so as to be better equipped to rein in, our drive
for dominance as manifested in our more deadly moral instincts, I for one am
glad Steven Pinker has the courage to violate so many of the outrageously
counterproductive postmodern taboos while having the grace to resist succumbing
himself, for the most part, to the temptation of self-righteousness.

17 comments:

gillt
said...

"The shift is not toward complacency: we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time. "

This is probably an important point because your review of Pinker's argument about declining violence as inevitable while singling out modern attempts to curb violence as misguided (outlawing war-ball) and harmful (third-wave feminism) suggest otherwise.

I'm surprised Pinker approvingly references Kanazawa. The guy is a lightening rod for controversy and has amassed an impressive amount of critics among his peers and others. My impression of his writing in BigThink and Psychology Today is that he's more of a shock-jock than a scientist.

Ha! Yeah, I still remember how goofy we all thought it was at St. Vincent's when they changed the name from war-ball to extinction of the dinosaurs.

But Pinker certainly never claimed declining violence was inevitable. He credited campaigns against violence against children for their successes--but giving them some credit doesn't mean agreeing with them on every point.

On the larger point about complacency, Pinker was merely saying the key to continuing progress is to identify what has been working so we can do more of it, not that we shouldn't be doing anything. The point I added was that charges of complacency are probably byproducts of the urge to amplify crimes and demonize people who examine them dispassionately.

I think Better Angels came out before the latest kerfuffle over Kanazawa's meretricious scandal-mongering. I thought about adding a parenthetical about him, but since the key point is about research findings and not the man himself (and since the essay was already going long) I decided I could treat it as irrelevant. The findings still appear to valid at any rate.

Okay, what you said about complacency makes sense assuming what you said about the criticisms of those who dispassionately look at things like rape and violence are as baseless and idiotic as you claim. I just haven't heard those criticisms. The criticisms I have heard critique the interpretation of the data or methods gathering...basically "the closer you get to humans the more politicized (read biased) the science gets." Which segues nicely into the radioactive Kanazawa. He prefers to frame his detractors' criticisms into a "you can't handle the truth" meme.

The latest perversion Kanazaw perpetrated was toward male asians and black females but the study you linked to is likely full of shit as well: pet Savannah theory, diminishing social inequalities and then overemphasizing meager IQ differences between atheists and theists, redefining liberalism to include libertarians, ignoring counter evidence that shows conservatives are more charitable than liberals...you know that sort of thing that makes you skeptical of his interpretation, but maybe this comment section isn't the place to get into it though.

You haven't heard those arguments? I find that hard to believe. "This isn't about sex; this is about assaultive domination and violence." That's Clair McCatskill at a hearing on "Sexual Assault" based on deliberately inflated numbers (classifying "unwanted touching" with rape as "sexual assault," most of the victims of which were men). (18:58 http://video.pbs.org/video/2365021914)

While I agree it's hard to keep politics out of science, it does not follow that we should purposely infuse more politics into science.

I'm reluctant to open this can of worms, but perversion? Perpetrated? He reported research findings. The postmodernism is strong in you. "likely full of shit" because you don't like its political implications?

On religion and intelligence: http://davesource.com/Fringe/Fringe/Religion/Average-intelligence-predicts-atheism-rates-across-137-nations-Lynn-et-al.pdf

On "meager IQ differences": the data describe a linear trend. On "charity": I think you're talking about a study that showed red states give more, but subtract tithing (as is warranted given Kanazawa's theory) and blue states win. http://philanthropy.com/article/FaithGiving/133611/The "redefining" he did was based on his theory: high-IQ people were more likely to say they personally should be taxed more, but not that the purpose of government was to redistribute wealth. Neither libertarian nor socialist, ie non-ideological.

Linear, huh. The biggest IQ spread between religious and non-religious looks to be about 6. Show me where Kanazawa explains how a few IQ points (arguably not the best metric anyway though it's the only one he uses) are biologically meaningful. It sounds like p value fishing.

What's troubling with Kanazawa is that he never addresses the obvious caveat of cultural influences as force in shaping belief. It's most obviously the case with inherently messy political identities (e.g., African Americans identify as conservative but vote liberal) Under Kanazawa's myopic definitions how do you classify a libertarian who believes low taxes and free markets are the best way to promote "the welfare of genetically unrelated others"?

Do you find Kanazawa's justification for discounting from his analysis all church donations (even then liberals only come out slightly ahead) reasonable? And why not include blood donations, where conservatives come out ahead? And why not account for the fact that conservatives earn less than liberals? This looks like cherry picking evidence to fit your biases. What's a more reasonable hypothesis: that a charity's marketing strategy largely determines whether it appeals to conservative or liberals or that atheist, childless liberals are a more evolved subpopulation of human because...Savannah Theory! Have you looked into Karen Winterich's work on politics and charity giving?

You misunderstood my point about science and politics as prescriptive rather than descriptive.

In part I agree with Clair McCatskill (haven't seen the vid) that violence and domination figure into rape or as some like to say, rape culture. Determining motivations for rape, you can make the obvious and minimally descriptive statement that everything is about reproductive fitness, but how much reproductive fitness involves securing reproductive access and how much of that is about dominating, violence and coercion or courtship? Different strategies for different situations even in the same species. When it comes to humans the line should be drawn at personal autonomy. In this respect then even some instances of coercion are to be considered rape.

And from a legal standpoint of course unwanted touching is an assault, just as unwanted sexual touching is sexual assault. What do you find so offensive about these things? Also, I don't get why including men as victims somehow disproves her point?

Monotonic bivariate relationship means two variables whose correlation goes in a constant direction on the graph, so I guess technically it's not a line but it does mean as IQ scores go up so does liberalism (it might have been more linear had there been finer gradations).

I'm not sure I buy (or care much about) the Savannah Hypothesis. But other studies support Pinker's hypothesis that intelligence is correlated with Enlightenment morality as opposed to ideology.

In Brazil, IQ is correlated with center-right politics (after a history of leftist violence) and general civic engagement. https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/political-orientations-intelligence-and-education.pdf

In GB, children with high IQs grow up to be more liberal and nontraditional: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18181782

The blanket charge of confirmation bias is the last resort for a scientist who has no valid criticisms of a study but doesn't like its results. Every study has a limited scope. If conservatives walk their dogs more does that invalidate the results of the study? (Though I agree with your marketing strategy theory too--it must play role.)

On the rape issue, you're mistaking methods for motivations. Of course, for it to qualify as rape, there must be violence involved. But are they doing it for the sake of sexual gratification or to intimidate? Occam's Razor suggests it's just the prior.

I really don't want to get into a debate on the topic, but I do recommend this article, which shows how eager activist researchers can be to get big numbers using misleading methods.: http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html

"But other studies support Pinker's hypothesis that intelligence is correlated with Enlightenment morality as opposed to ideology."

Good to know, perhaps you should have used them instead, which was my original, minor complaint.

"On the rape issue, you're mistaking methods for motivations. Of course, for it to qualify as rape, there must be violence involved"

So of course rendering someone unconscious with rohypnol isn't considered rape because violence wasn't involved. Or a priest using his position of authority to coerce a child into sexual congress and then threatening him if he tells, again no violence no rape. Here in the U.S. rape has always been about consent, not violence. Your writing baffles me.

My point about IQ scores is that a six point difference across a heterogeneous population (the U.S.) is trivial and very likely blind to selection, That Kanazawa didn't consider other factors is not a "limitation of scope" but lazy/biased science. A common view is that culture shapes IQ scores more than IQ scores shape culture. Is that point even considered in his paper? How does he handle it? You mention Brazil, and among Kanazawa's 125 other countries was Ethiopia with and average IQ score of 63, which he blames for their poor life expectancy...as opposed to say poverty, war, unhealthy living conditions. Again, it's a gross over-interpretation of rather unimpressive data.

"The blanket charge of confirmation bias is the last resort for a scientist who has no valid criticisms of a study but doesn't like its results. Every study has a limited scope."

Now come-on, you can't expect your heavy-handed rhetoric to give pause if you breathlessly conclude with a bromide.

Ha ha. I concede your point about violence. You caught me using a sloppy shorthand. Dominance, force, coercion, threatened violence, sly drugging--all these strike me as methods and not motives.

I'm really not sure what Kanazawa was thinking when he published his theory about sub-Saharan Africa. All I can come up with is that he was violating the taboo for the sake of violating the taboo. I would just point out his paper on intelligence and politics wasn't predicated on that theory in any way. So, as silly and pointlessly incendiary as that paper was, this one seems to be based on good data. It was peer reviewed and everything.

As for heavy-handed rhetoric, damn it all, it's just too fun to resist.

I guess we're on the same page about rape motivations. Maybe McCatskill was arguing from a victim's standpoint, where sex is less relevant than the violence and subjugation perpetrated.

I'm glad my shock-jock characterization of Kanazawa is gaining traction with you but we'll just have to agree to disagree about what counts as good data and sound interpretation in the Kanazawa paper in question though.

Pinker actually makes a very similar point about the difference btwn victim and perpetrator perspectives. You're probably right, but I'd argue the perp's perspective--or at least his/her motive--is the important thing to look at in preventing future crimes. Eye for an Eye and whole blind worlds and all.

Back to Pinker's theory. This study had an interesting methodology,but I can't find the full version I read a while back. It supports the theory that abstract reasoning of the type that increases with the Flynn Effect is incompatible with ideology (and prejudice).

"but I'd argue the perp's perspective--or at least his/her motive--is the important thing to look at in preventing future crimes. Eye for an Eye and whole blind worlds and all."

This sounds right and it sounds like, all else being equal, a good argument for legalized prostitution. Putting aside the reality of human trafficking, a lot of us work jobs just to pay the bills and not because we particularly enjoy running a cash register or even not being our own boss. Like the American Dream pure autonomy is a goddamn myth (something you should tell all your undergrad lit majors). Does that mean prostitution can be just like flipping burgers and is it realistic to expect to disentangle the human trafficking aspect?

In regards to the study. I think the null hypothesis is that g has a normal distribution in the general population. This was accounted for by using a representative slice of UK population, check. The abstract said they controlled for a few environmental factors, implying that what they measured was heritable. I'd like to see if they measured and then controlled for my anecdotal observation that as we age we grow more conservative/prejudice.

Is there a reason why we would expect not to then see an enrichment of prejudice in the severely mentally impaired, say we test a cohort on the same population of adults before and after brain damage and another cohort of the genetically mentally impaired.

negative review of "The Evolution of Violence" with a forward by Pinker.

http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP1201150119.pdf

Got a kick out of this interdisciplinary insult.

"a great deal of education about evolutionary theory remains to be done before the contributions of evolutionary theory can be adequately evaluated, much less applied, by most standard social scientists."

When you referred to an interdisciplinary insult, I was expecting to find one of the barbs ritually traded between paleontologists and molecular biologists, or either of these and anthropologists. But Craig Palmer is an evolutionary anthropologist (one who infamously argued that rape may serve adaptive purposes). So this review reads like a peevish case of "If only my colleagues understood evolution as well as I do."

Also, the review isn't really negative. He praises most of the chapters. His criticism is based on expectations raised on the back cover that go unmet in the edition. Does he know some copywriter hired by the publisher probably wrote the blurbs? He also faults the edition for repetitions and lacuna in explanations--did he know it was a consortium paper?

The review is fascinatingly terrible, shows what happens when a scholar is tasked with writing a review for a large audience and simply can't think of anything to say. It's petty and unfair. But somehow manages to be a compelling read.